Last Stop on Market Street

Today in class, we began our day with the reading portion of MAP testing. My kinders did WONDERFUL! They all took their time to do their best and I was so proud of how well they logged on, listened to the questions and tried their best! In reading, I read the class a story called Last Stop On Market Street. This beautiful story was about a boy named CJ and his grandmother who take a bus ride every Sunday where they go to church and take the bus to a soup kitchen to volunteer their time to help serve food to those in need. They don't have a car and CJ expresses his admiration to his grandmother and bummed out attitude when they have to take the bus. On the bus ride to the soup kitchen CJ's grandmother teaches him how to find beauty and gratitude in their everyday world, even with poverty and urban challenges. This story had a beautiful message and the class loved it! After we did a comprehension activity to ensure they were understanding the story as we read it and we did a cute activity that went along with it. For the activity, I gave the kids a piece of paper with a head outline. I asked them to make the outline to be a picture of themselves and showed them how to add eyes, a nose, mouth, detail to the ears, eyebrows and hair. They had so much fun turning the outline into a portrait of them using realistic colors for their eyes, skin and hair. Next, I gave them some paper glasses, on the left it said something people see with a cloud with rain. On the right side, I asked them to draw something they would see if they saw rain what could they find that's beautiful from it or gratitude in the moment. They did a great job drawing something and had so much fun adding lots of fun detail. They were excited to bring them home to share with all of you. We talked a lot in this lesson about how important it is to walk through life and find the beauty in it and be thankful for the things we have. We live in a beautiful place with beautiful people who give a lot of themselves to help others. Here is the class with their gratitude sunglasses project:

In math, I partnered the class up to play "Boom, Boom, Clap Subtratton." They LOVED it and had so much fun practicing subtraction within 5. They are starting to know them by memory and not needing to use their fingers to get the answers. The answer is becoming automatic when I give them a subtraction sentence. Way to go, K-1! It was a great day!